


Darling

by charcolor



Category: Original Work
Genre: Abuse, Brainwashing, Gen, Songfic, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-30
Updated: 2018-06-30
Packaged: 2019-05-30 20:50:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15104633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charcolor/pseuds/charcolor
Summary: After a car crash that kills her elder sister, Crystal is taken to a small emergency clinic operated by Dr. Freeman, and her horrific fate is sealed.(Inspired by the song Darling by MARETU.)





	Darling

**Author's Note:**

> this was originally written for my creative writing class.

Crystal Madigen was a miraculous tragedy. Anyone who knew of her would understand.

She was twenty-two when that life-changing accident happened. It was in an obscure, remote part of town. Her sister was driving the van as Crystal slept in the passenger’s seat. Then, all too suddenly, a fire exploded into her vision. The van, she soon discovered, had toppled over a well-hidden cliff. The impact fractured both of Crystal’s legs so that she could only drag herself away with her arms. She considered calling an ambulance immediately, but she hadn’t thought to bring her phone with her, and her sister’s phone was likely melting with her charred carcass, still visible among the flames as she lay unmoving.

With tears burning the corners of her vision, Crystal left her sister behind in the wreckage and searched until she saw a rusted red house, pale light filling the windows, her fleeting chance of salvaging herself.

There, she met Mia Shepard, a slender woman who carried the scent of cigarette smoke. Crystal was first under the impression that she was too cynical to care for the situation, with a glint in her narrow, strangely reddish eyes, and a thin mouth lined with scarlet lipstick. However, as Crystal explained the situation, she nodded quietly, and then informed her, in a breezy voice, “I know someone who runs an emergency clinic. I can call him and he’ll come over and take you in with no charge.”

At this, Crystal bubbled over with tearful “thank you”’s, and sat to wait to be picked up by this doctor on a dusty wine-red loveseat, observing the empty photo frames and a stray silver ring on the end table. Moments later, Crystal suddenly became so overwhelmed by the sequence of events, from the car accident to her sister burning to death to Mia’s kindness and hospitality, that she lost consciousness. When she awoke, she found that she was in a hospital bed, a man in a white doctor’s coat watching over her.

This man was Dr. Luca Freeman. He would be Crystal’s personal caretaker, and her eternal undoing.

Crystal quickly became infatuated with him. She was oblivious to the sadistic shine in his silver-shaded eyes, and only trusted his mask of compassion and generosity. From then on, no matter how Luca hurt her, she forgave. If she did not forgive, she was punished, and she accepted this rule as a part of their love.

The first time Crystal stepped out of line was when she asked where Luca had been all day. She was all alone when she woke up in the hospital bed, and did not see her darling until the sun started to set. Luca said it didn’t matter. When Crystal persisted, he found a match, lit it, and began to scorch the skin on her ankles.

Crystal, not wanting to accept this just yet, painfully shrieked, “Why are you burning me?” Her instinct was to kick, but her legs were not quite mended, and so it was to no avail.

“I need to see if you’re as beautifully strong as you look,” Luca responded in a chilled tone.  “To see if your beauty could ever be tarnished. And you need to learn how to behave.”

“Stop it! It _hurts_!”

“Oh, Crystal,” he sighed, a condescending smile spreading across his face, a chuckle sewn into his words. “There are so many things you are too naive to understand.”

It was not a false statement. Even if Crystal agreed to her punishment with reluctance, and still wished to voice her disapproval of Luca’s cunning flattery and cruel laughter, she was too naive.

When Crystal began to experience a swelled ache in her stomach one day, she confided in the doctor. The doctor examined her and decided to perform a surgery in secret. He fed Crystal a strong drug so that she was senseless enough to have her body cut open, and then to have the “mutilation of love” ripped out of her. Crystal wasn’t aware that this had happened, but she did feel a very strange, very faint maternal sense.

“Darling, I want to have a child,” she told him, deciding that was the reason.

The doctor refused, saying that Crystal couldn’t endure that, knowing the real cause of her maternal nature was the bloody embryo buried outside. Crystal would feel a silent beckoning to the resting place, but she was forbidden from leaving her room. She knew she’d lost something, but she ignored the pangs of grief and decided that there had to be another reason why Luca did not want to have a child with her.

A few days later, Crystal caught sight of two silhouettes outside her window. One was unmistakably her darling. The other was a woman whom she’d seen before, that last fateful night before she’d woken up in the hospital bed. It was Mia Shepard. She watched them get close, maybe even touch, before parting ways. In minutes, Luca was opening the door to Crystal’s room.

“What were you doing with Mia?” Crystal immediately asked.

Luca shook his head. “That is none of your business, Crystal.”

Crystal refused to let it go. “Did you kiss her? Are you in love with her?” She began to stand up, ignoring the stinging pain shooting up her legs. “I saw you through the win--”

Before she could finish, Luca delivered an abrupt blow to her face, his fist rough and sturdy as a sharp stone. The pulsing shock quickly captured her right eye, and she couldn’t help shedding a few cold tears and letting a few strained gasps escape her throat.

“It’s none of your business,” Luca repeated, his voice more firm, his brow tightened in rage. “Understand?”

Out of paralyzing fear, she nodded in agreement, but eventually Crystal connected the dots. Luca was indeed in love with Mia, and vice versa. Behind his effortless, empty statements of dedication for Crystal, he was giving it all to Mia. Even if Mia was the reason she was here in the first place, Crystal grew an envious hatred for her. But for Luca, the one who had threatened her, she felt nothing but longing.

“Where were you last night, darling?” she asked him one morning.

He was with Mia. Crystal knew this, but she wanted to hear him say it. He did not. He averted his eyes and said, “That is none of your business.”

Crystal took an indignant inhale, her rounded cheeks puffing with air. “I think I’ve been a good girl, haven’t I? Tell me what you were doing with Mia.”

Luca stiffened and squinted. “I thought we agreed,” he said icily, “that my actions with Mia are not for you to discuss.”

An argument was coming, but Crystal accepted it. She reasoned to herself that without her disputes with the doctor, their relationship would be “boring.”

“I saw you making love through the window,” Crystal revealed, raising her voice with passion. “ _I_ love you. But you’re with her all the time, even when I do so much for you. Why would you think Mia deserves it? Is it _burning_ or something in your--”

“ _Quiet!_ ” Luca’s furious shout was powerful enough to interrupt her. “You don’t know _anything,_ Crystal.”

“Stop messing around!” Crystal was beginning to scream now. “Just tell me the _truth,_ darling! I hate when you play games like this!”

“Is this a _game_ to you?”

“Why are you always insinuating things like that?”

“I’m not _insinuating_ \--”

“Do you have any idea how much I care for you?” Tears shone in Crystal’s cloudy gray irises. “I think about this fantasy every day, one where you protect me and love me and spend all your time with me. Haven’t you ever felt anything like that? Haven’t you ever heard--”

Her yelp cut off her words when Luca pinned her to the bed. “That’s enough,” he asserted, suddenly and eerily calm. “I’ll help you resolve this for yourself. Hold still.”

He strapped Crystal to the bed and pulled something out of his pocket. In the center of her vision was the silver glint of an icepick just before it was thrust into her left eye. Crystal didn’t want to scream, but her body couldn’t help it. The agony was excruciating, but not enough to render her unconscious. Through her bruised right eye, the doctor’s gloved fingers slipped in and out of her vision as the icepick dug its way around her prefrontal cortex. She wouldn’t be able to remember this, of course. It was Dr. Freeman’s own procedure. He’d perfected it over the years, so that the patient would be left alive, incapacitated or not.

Mia Shepard was his first success. Unlike Crystal, she was given the mercy of anaesthesia, and she was unaware of her surgery until Luca told her afterward. The effects of the lobotomy caused Mia to consider his actions humane. On the surface, as Crystal met her, she was a perfectly sane woman whose only real issue was her smoking habit. Mia was just as broken as Crystal. Nobody was aware of this truth. Even the doctor truly believed he had “saved” her, for before she’d met him she was a traumatized widow who couldn’t bear the stress of her daily life.

She saw her wife’s murder take place right before her eyes. Her name was Rosa. A man found the two of them taking a romantic walk in the fields on a cool autumn night. It was a man with unknown motives. Perhaps he simply found joy in committing murder. He attacked from behind with a butcher’s knife, swiftly slicing Rosa’s throat. Mia could only stare in shock, watching her wife, whom she’d been lovingly conversing with moments ago, fall in a choked-up heap on the faded green grass, quickly becoming stained with her blood. The man had intended to kill them both. The only reason Mia survived was because a surge of rage drove her to deliver a blow to his skull, knocking him out. Mia called the police to the scene, but while waiting for them, as she stared at Rosa’s corpse, the lifeless bloody body of her soulmate, Mia was then overcome with a wave of despair, and fled to a small, abandoned house far away, in a remote part of town.

The police never discovered who had called them. They knew it wasn’t the dead woman, because the woman that had called them mentioned a dead wife. The house Mia isolated herself in was too well-hidden for the police to easily come across. Even if they had, it was near impossible for them to realize who Mia really was, especially after she was found by someone else.

Dr. Luca Freeman’s clinic was close by, and he soon came across her dwelling. When Mia told him, in between sobs, of her predicament, the doctor took her in and “cured” her of her memories. He forcefully altered not only all memories of her marriage and the subsequent murder, but also the mechanism of her brain. After this, Mia was no longer crying every day. She did not remember the murder, nor did she remember the woman she’d married. Thankful to the doctor for ridding her of her forgotten burden, she decided to permanently reside in the dwelling she’d come across, and to become the doctor’s lover.

The doctor had forced her brain to accept this as her ultimate desire.

Mia expressed her gratitude every day, in any way the doctor wanted. Of course, a woman as beautiful as her would only need one way to express her gratitude. She was modified in that aspect, too. More surgery to perfect her body, and malnutrition for good measure. She was his captive love doll, and she cherished every second of it.

Poor Crystal had no way of knowing any of this, even before her lobotomy. The only person who knew of Mia’s past was Luca. He never told Crystal anything about her. Only being seen with her through the window of Crystal’s room, and refusing to explain why.

Mia was alone now, watching from the same window. One would expect her to be shocked, revolted, mortified, seeing this young woman restrained to the operating table, bruised in one eye, bleeding profusely out of the other as a masked man poked and prodded with an icepick inside her skull, all while she was fully awake. Mia honestly believed that this was an act of goodness, and instead watched with anticipation and intrigue.

This lobotomy truly set Crystal’s fate in stone. Unlike Mia, she still had a feeble grain of awareness that Luca was malicious, a cruel man who wanted nothing more than to use and hurt her. Unfortunately, this was not enough to convince her to abandon her unconditional love for him, her desperate desire to serve and satisfy him. She had completely given up her sense of self-preservation and self-protection, for his sake. She willingly blinded herself to the pain this all caused. If she genuinely loved him, she thought, then it was all worth it. She accepted this as her future, promising to no longer resist it.

Realistically, Crystal Madigen should have died. She fractured her legs in a flaming car, and dragged herself the entire distance from there to Mia’s dwelling. Then, after being trapped in Luca’s clinic, she had her ankles burned, an embryo ripped out of her sliced-open stomach, one eye bruised to the point of unbearable pain, the other barely attached to her, her brain having had a used icepick poked inside, being rearranged by metal. The only thing that died, gradually, was her trigeminal nerve. As it decayed, she lost feeling of her face, and control of her jaws and eyes. She could no longer eat or speak without assistance from Luca. She also slowly but surely lost not only the will, but the _ability_ to make her own decisions, basing her actions entirely on Luca’s words. Despite the captive suffering inflicted on her, Crystal was still alive, and she was still “happy,” content with her life. She saw this utter abuse as true love, in her own magical, fantastical, romantic story, filling her whole world with nothing but Luca’s tyranny and the white walls of her room.

What a miraculous tragedy.


End file.
